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The Color of Neanderthal Eyes / And Strange at Ecbatan the Trees
First publication in book form of Alice Bradley Sheldon's (writing under the pseudonym James Triptree, Jr.) novella, which is here coupled with Michael Bishop's novella 'And Strange at Ecbatan the Trees'
Cover art for Tiptree by Dave Archer, for Bishop by Brian Waugh
Cover art for Tiptree by Dave Archer, for Bishop by Brian Waugh
209 pages, Paperback
First published December 1, 1989
About the author
James Tiptree Jr.
243 books600 followers"James Tiptree Jr." was born Alice Bradley in Chicago in 1915. Her mother was the writer Mary Hastings Bradley; her father, Herbert, was a lawyer and explorer. Throughout her childhood she traveled with her parents, mostly to Africa, but also to India and Southeast Asia. Her early work was as an artist and art critic. During World War II she enlisted in the Army and became the first American female photointelligence officer. In Germany after the war, she met and married her commanding officer, Huntington D. Sheldon. In the early 1950s, both Sheldons joined the then-new CIA; he made it his career, but she resigned in 1955, went back to college, and earned a Ph.D. in experimental psychology.
At about this same time, Alli Sheldon started writing science fiction. She wrote four stories and sent them off to four different science fiction magazines. She did not want to publish under her real name, because of her CIA and academic ties, and she intended to use a new pseudonym for each group of stories until some sold. They started selling immediately, and only the first pseudonym—"Tiptree" from a jar of jelly, "James" because she felt editors would be more receptive to a male writer, and "Jr." for fun—was needed. (A second pseudonym, "Raccoona Sheldon," came along later, so she could have a female persona.)
Tiptree quickly became one of the most respected writers in the field, winning the Hugo Award for The Girl Who was Plugged In and Houston, Houston, Do You Read?, and the Nebula Award for "Love is the Plan, the Plan is Death" and Houston, Houston. Raccoona won the Nebula for "The Screwfly Solution," and Tiptree won the World Fantasy Award for the collection Tales from the Quintana Roo.
The Tiptree fiction reflects Alli Sheldon's interests and concerns throughout her life: the alien among us (a role she portrayed in her childhood travels), the health of the planet, the quality of perception, the role of women, love, death, and humanity's place in a vast, cold universe. The Otherwise Award (formerly the Tiptree Award) has celebrated science fiction that "expands and explores gender roles" since 1991.
Alice Sheldon died in 1987 by her own hand. Writing in her first book about the suicide of Hart Crane, she said succinctly: "Poets extrapolate."
Julie Phillips wrote her biography, James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon
At about this same time, Alli Sheldon started writing science fiction. She wrote four stories and sent them off to four different science fiction magazines. She did not want to publish under her real name, because of her CIA and academic ties, and she intended to use a new pseudonym for each group of stories until some sold. They started selling immediately, and only the first pseudonym—"Tiptree" from a jar of jelly, "James" because she felt editors would be more receptive to a male writer, and "Jr." for fun—was needed. (A second pseudonym, "Raccoona Sheldon," came along later, so she could have a female persona.)
Tiptree quickly became one of the most respected writers in the field, winning the Hugo Award for The Girl Who was Plugged In and Houston, Houston, Do You Read?, and the Nebula Award for "Love is the Plan, the Plan is Death" and Houston, Houston. Raccoona won the Nebula for "The Screwfly Solution," and Tiptree won the World Fantasy Award for the collection Tales from the Quintana Roo.
The Tiptree fiction reflects Alli Sheldon's interests and concerns throughout her life: the alien among us (a role she portrayed in her childhood travels), the health of the planet, the quality of perception, the role of women, love, death, and humanity's place in a vast, cold universe. The Otherwise Award (formerly the Tiptree Award) has celebrated science fiction that "expands and explores gender roles" since 1991.
Alice Sheldon died in 1987 by her own hand. Writing in her first book about the suicide of Hart Crane, she said succinctly: "Poets extrapolate."
Julie Phillips wrote her biography, James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
January 10, 2021
This is Tor Double #16, of a series of 36 double books published from 1988 to 1991 by Tor Books. It contains two novellas, bound together tête-bêche in mass market paperback – back-to-back, inverted, with two front covers and both titles on the spine. The novellas are listed here alphabetically by author; neither should be considered “primary.”
And Strange At Ecbatan The Trees, by Michael Bishop (1976) ***
Michael Bishop’s second novel was originally published in 1976 in hardcover. In 1977, it was re-published as a DAW paperback under the title “Beneath The Shattered Moons.” In the distant future, there are two genetically engineered races of humanity. The story is of a growing conflict between them that draws in the intervention of a third group – the Parfects who have engineered them. I found it to be a pretty conventional SF adventure, typical of the 1970s.
The Color of Neanderthal Eyes, by James Tiptree, Jr. (1988) ***
This was originally published in the May 1988 edition of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It had been revealed eleven years earlier that James Tiptree, Jr. was the pen-name of Alice B. Sheldon. The novella was 5th place for Locus Award short fiction in 1989. A male space explorer lands on an alien world where he makes First Contact with an ugly native female – but who is beautiful by human standards. One thing leads to another, including interspecies love, sex, and procreation. The story does not actually have anything to do with Homo Neanderthalensis, except that they are often portrayed as ugly.
And Strange At Ecbatan The Trees, by Michael Bishop (1976) ***
Michael Bishop’s second novel was originally published in 1976 in hardcover. In 1977, it was re-published as a DAW paperback under the title “Beneath The Shattered Moons.” In the distant future, there are two genetically engineered races of humanity. The story is of a growing conflict between them that draws in the intervention of a third group – the Parfects who have engineered them. I found it to be a pretty conventional SF adventure, typical of the 1970s.
The Color of Neanderthal Eyes, by James Tiptree, Jr. (1988) ***
This was originally published in the May 1988 edition of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It had been revealed eleven years earlier that James Tiptree, Jr. was the pen-name of Alice B. Sheldon. The novella was 5th place for Locus Award short fiction in 1989. A male space explorer lands on an alien world where he makes First Contact with an ugly native female – but who is beautiful by human standards. One thing leads to another, including interspecies love, sex, and procreation. The story does not actually have anything to do with Homo Neanderthalensis, except that they are often portrayed as ugly.
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April 2, 2024The Color of Neanderthal Eyes- 4⭐️
And Strange at Ecbatan the Trees- 2.5⭐️
And Strange at Ecbatan the Trees- 2.5⭐️
October 20, 2020
[This is just for The Color of Neanderthal Eyes - ASAETT is reviewed in the book's own entry]
What a strangely compelling novella this is. At first I came very close to a few eye rolls, what with wish-fulfilment alien mermaids, casually-undertaken interspecies sex (one thing just sort of led to another, as it does), disparate evolutions with results so similar even the makers of Star Trek might blush. But as things progressed I found myself enjoying the ride. There's an almost breathless audacity and matter-of-factness to it all: man holidaying on paradise world encounters beautiful female native, gets her pregnant, saves her people from attacks by golden-skinned hominids by teaching them the ways of violence and war, watches his beloved begin to die in horrific childbirth, masticates food for his children and dribbles it through what was once his girlfriend's oesophagus into the now separate and still-functioning womb his miracle offspring yet reside in.
This should have been written in the fifties or sixties, and so seems anachronistic as a nineties publication (sexism abounds, though without deliberate intent, as -as you might infer- do clichés), but it remains a rather entertaining read almost in spite of itself.
What a strangely compelling novella this is. At first I came very close to a few eye rolls, what with wish-fulfilment alien mermaids, casually-undertaken interspecies sex (one thing just sort of led to another, as it does), disparate evolutions with results so similar even the makers of Star Trek might blush. But as things progressed I found myself enjoying the ride. There's an almost breathless audacity and matter-of-factness to it all: man holidaying on paradise world encounters beautiful female native, gets her pregnant, saves her people from attacks by golden-skinned hominids by teaching them the ways of violence and war, watches his beloved begin to die in horrific childbirth, masticates food for his children and dribbles it through what was once his girlfriend's oesophagus into the now separate and still-functioning womb his miracle offspring yet reside in.
This should have been written in the fifties or sixties, and so seems anachronistic as a nineties publication (sexism abounds, though without deliberate intent, as -as you might infer- do clichés), but it remains a rather entertaining read almost in spite of itself.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
April 22, 2020
Just a little about Tiptree's half; I've marked up Bishop's at And Strange at Ecbatan the Trees.
As is not always the case with Tiptree, we get a male narrator one can actually like, even if the story does have a very old-fashioned Green Mansions vibe to it. And I couldn't help but feel the author was poking at Jared's continual references to Kamir as "my little mermaid", to the point I feared something awful was going to happen to the two of them just because he was a guy acting like a guy.
Admittedly, an odd thing to be in suspense about. What comes of having read enough other Tiptree. And too much Joanna Russ.
As is not always the case with Tiptree, we get a male narrator one can actually like, even if the story does have a very old-fashioned Green Mansions vibe to it. And I couldn't help but feel the author was poking at Jared's continual references to Kamir as "my little mermaid", to the point I feared something awful was going to happen to the two of them just because he was a guy acting like a guy.
Admittedly, an odd thing to be in suspense about. What comes of having read enough other Tiptree. And too much Joanna Russ.
June 30, 2024
Lijepa priča, super je opisan planet i narodi o kojima je priča.
November 13, 2015
My positive appreciation of Tiptree comes of having read her omnibus collection of short fiction, Her Smoke Rose up Forever; her novel, Up the Walls of the World; and a biography by Julia Phillips, James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon. The story around Tiptree—the male pen name of retired CIA analyst and research psychologist Alice Sheldon—is as fascinating as any of her fiction, especially as the male pseudonym had lent her voice and writerly persona unquestioned masculine authority. In 1976, after nearly a decade of an authorial and epistolary existence as James Tiptree, Jr., she was unmasked. During the quietus of her alter ego, she considered giving up writing entirely, unsure about her own identity and sense of purpose. Even while sensing that it would never lend her the same confidence of tone, Sheldon resumed writing with the same Tiptree pseudonym. While readers and peers continued to praise the fiction of James Tiptree, Jr.—knowing that it was a woman behind the pen name—there was general consensus that the fire did not burn as brightly, nor as intensely in the subsequent, final decade of her life.
I was curious to read The Color of Neanderthal Eyes because it was written only a year before her suicide, which would give me means to judge for myself whether or not “late period” Tiptree was on par with her earlier work. (I also have a fondness for the concept of Neanderthals as being an evolutionary dead end, one which may or may not have been more benign than the Cro Magnon or Denisovan species which are the more direct antecedents of present-day humans. DNA of modern humans indicates Neanderthal-Denisovan interbreeding, but it does not rule out a general genocidal extermination. William Golding’s novel, The Inheritors—to which I believe Tiptree is tipping her hat—is a chilling, captivating parable of the origins of modern humans.)
The events in The Color of Neanderthal Eyes are sufficient to fill a novel, which suggests that there is a collapsing of time and events that would have been better served with more dilation, in particular Tom Jared’s extraordinary romantic idyll with the amphibious gilled humanoid Kamir, which species he dubs Mnerrin. Not only is there in this relationship the instance of exogamy and xenophilia—two of Tiptree’s recurrent themes—there is also extra-species telepathic communication, a post-1976 theme, a postulation of hope that the essential opaqueness she felt exists between people could be bridged.
Additional development of the story would be more of Jared's integration into the Mnerrin community, more anthropological cross-species comparison and description of a culture that exhibited pre-Socratic Greek intelligence, was minimally tool-using, and lived peacefully with one another and within their environment, reluctant even to kill the small fish whose mortality they could sense telepathically. Further development of the Mnerrin culture would give Tiptree space to elaborate on the roles of the two genders, a theme she explores in a number of ways in her fiction to show that there is or can be a good deal of fluidity in the roles, that, for instance, either could be or neither need be dominant.
But it’s a plausible emotional growth that would most enhance this compact novella. The desperate, plaintive note that opens the story—Tom Jared speaking directly to the reader about the horror he’s committed—is a portmanteau of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim, both extremities of expression about guilt and exposure to human depravity, but there is too little correlation with the facts of the story to support this high pitch of emotion. Too much ends up being sacrificed to the action around introducing the pacific Mnerrin to the violence necessary to resist and kill the invading gold-hued, land-bound humanoid species. An action narrative replaces what should be a more measured narrative that dissects this clash of species, where it is more thoroughly clear that Jared is intervening in ways that contradict his professional guidelines and personal conscience.
While I enjoyed the story, I saw how it might have been more. Tiptree rightly aims for more expansiveness than a short story could afford, but does not go far enough to properly set up the basis for the emotional truth of his principal’s anguished cri de coeur. [One remedy—requiring a poetic/imagistic/impressionistic use of language—would be to convey much of the communication as telepathic thought, since all the principal characters were telepathic, and even the diminished or absent abilities of the invaders would present distinctive features of thought that reflected their benighted self-regard and self-importance.]
I was curious to read The Color of Neanderthal Eyes because it was written only a year before her suicide, which would give me means to judge for myself whether or not “late period” Tiptree was on par with her earlier work. (I also have a fondness for the concept of Neanderthals as being an evolutionary dead end, one which may or may not have been more benign than the Cro Magnon or Denisovan species which are the more direct antecedents of present-day humans. DNA of modern humans indicates Neanderthal-Denisovan interbreeding, but it does not rule out a general genocidal extermination. William Golding’s novel, The Inheritors—to which I believe Tiptree is tipping her hat—is a chilling, captivating parable of the origins of modern humans.)
The events in The Color of Neanderthal Eyes are sufficient to fill a novel, which suggests that there is a collapsing of time and events that would have been better served with more dilation, in particular Tom Jared’s extraordinary romantic idyll with the amphibious gilled humanoid Kamir, which species he dubs Mnerrin. Not only is there in this relationship the instance of exogamy and xenophilia—two of Tiptree’s recurrent themes—there is also extra-species telepathic communication, a post-1976 theme, a postulation of hope that the essential opaqueness she felt exists between people could be bridged.
Additional development of the story would be more of Jared's integration into the Mnerrin community, more anthropological cross-species comparison and description of a culture that exhibited pre-Socratic Greek intelligence, was minimally tool-using, and lived peacefully with one another and within their environment, reluctant even to kill the small fish whose mortality they could sense telepathically. Further development of the Mnerrin culture would give Tiptree space to elaborate on the roles of the two genders, a theme she explores in a number of ways in her fiction to show that there is or can be a good deal of fluidity in the roles, that, for instance, either could be or neither need be dominant.
But it’s a plausible emotional growth that would most enhance this compact novella. The desperate, plaintive note that opens the story—Tom Jared speaking directly to the reader about the horror he’s committed—is a portmanteau of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim, both extremities of expression about guilt and exposure to human depravity, but there is too little correlation with the facts of the story to support this high pitch of emotion. Too much ends up being sacrificed to the action around introducing the pacific Mnerrin to the violence necessary to resist and kill the invading gold-hued, land-bound humanoid species. An action narrative replaces what should be a more measured narrative that dissects this clash of species, where it is more thoroughly clear that Jared is intervening in ways that contradict his professional guidelines and personal conscience.
While I enjoyed the story, I saw how it might have been more. Tiptree rightly aims for more expansiveness than a short story could afford, but does not go far enough to properly set up the basis for the emotional truth of his principal’s anguished cri de coeur. [One remedy—requiring a poetic/imagistic/impressionistic use of language—would be to convey much of the communication as telepathic thought, since all the principal characters were telepathic, and even the diminished or absent abilities of the invaders would present distinctive features of thought that reflected their benighted self-regard and self-importance.]
May 15, 2008
My view of this book (or half of the double book) is vividly colored by the fact that Tiptree is actually Alice Sheldon. She really reveled in her macho male role--part of her "deceit" was that she really was more capable at so many of the masculine pursuits than many of her contemporary male sci-fi writers. So the relationship between the spaceman (for the first bunch of pages I had assumed the main character is female, but again, the aforementioned coloring) and the alien race is quite titillating.
There is still a lot of the "oh you poor uncivilized race" interaction and a patronizing quality to the description of the people. But still a good, quick read. Lots of action (and alien romance, hubba hubba).
There is still a lot of the "oh you poor uncivilized race" interaction and a patronizing quality to the description of the people. But still a good, quick read. Lots of action (and alien romance, hubba hubba).
November 2, 2013
I do enjoy James Tiptree Junior, but this novella felt a bit tired and dated. Human meets alien, falls in love with alien , saves her species. It's adequately written, but nothing all that special. The Michael Bishop novella, however, is a gem. I think he's one of those tragically under appreciated sf authors that more people should read. His novella, about a zoo of Homo sapiens, subtly genetically engineered into an emotionally stunted underclass and a passionate over class by post humans is a complicated tale of loss, inevitability and fragility. On the surface it's about the losses of war, but there was enough layering and shading in it to remind me of Gene Wolfe.
April 15, 2016
The Color of Neanderthal Eyes - 2 stars. This read, at least at first, like bad alien romance fiction. It was hard to believe and hard to get into.
Strange at Ecbatan the Trees - 4 stars. Wow. What a splendid novella. The only knock on it I have is that it left me wanting more. I love the title and am a bit put off by the fact that it was later published with a more straightforward title. It reminded me of Gene Wolfe both in its strangeness and its vision, and it makes me wonder how much the two have influenced each other.
Strange at Ecbatan the Trees - 4 stars. Wow. What a splendid novella. The only knock on it I have is that it left me wanting more. I love the title and am a bit put off by the fact that it was later published with a more straightforward title. It reminded me of Gene Wolfe both in its strangeness and its vision, and it makes me wonder how much the two have influenced each other.
July 25, 2009
This is a short novel. Basically, an Earthman goes to an undiscovered planet for a vacation & falls in love w/ an alien. They mate & she has babies. Once you overlook the fact that the aliens are way too much like humans, the first 1/3 of the story is amazing, detailing the romance & courtship, written in a beautiful healthy style, like wildly colored flowers blooming. Tiptree has done better, but is always worth reading.
January 19, 2012
Ok - this was a part of a series that tacked 2 science fiction short stories by different authors back to back. I've read a lot of James Tiptree Jr. aka Alice Sheldon, and I was disappointed since I've seen her do the same themes, same story better. But the Michael Bishop was good. I started it, didn't quite get into it, left it alone for a few months, then came back, and everything that made me hold it at arms length the first time around really moved me today.
April 17, 2014
"And Strange At Ecbatan The Trees" has to be one of the least commercial book titles ever, but it's a good story. It's also an apprentice work, full of extremes that border on the grotesque, exploring several science fiction tropes simultaneously, all under the overriding theme of "control" -- political, emotional, & personal. A decent, quick (133 pages) read.
June 17, 2007
I only read the Bishop story but it was really good.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews